- Tip #1: Fine-Tune Your Query with More Keywords
- Tip #2: Search for Either One Word or Another
- Tip #3: Include Stop Words
- Tip #4: Exclude Irrelevant Words
- Tip #5: Search for Similar Words
- Tip #6: Search for Similar Pages
- Tip #7: Search for an Exact Phrase
- Tip #8: Use Google's Advanced Search Page
- Tip #9: Search Within Your Search Results
- Tip #10: Search Google's Other Sites
Tip #7: Search for an Exact Phrase
Sometimes what you're searching for isn't described by list keywords; instead, it's an exact phrase. And when you're searching for an exact phrase, you don't get the best results simply by entering all the words in the phrase as your query. Google might return results including the phrase, but it will also return results that include all those words—but not necessarily in that exact order.
So when you want to search for an exact phrase, you need to enclose the phrase in quotation marks. This tells Google to search for the precise keywords in the prescribed order.
For example, if you're searching for anything related to the movie Star Wars, you could enter star wars as your query. You'd probably get acceptable results, but know that these results will include all pages that include both the words "star" and "wars," even if they don't appear adjacent to one another. In other words, your results will include a lot of pages that aren't about the movie.
To limit the results just to pages about the sci-fi epic, include the two words in that precise order as a phrase. So you should enter the query "star wars"—making sure to surround the phrase with quotation marks. This way, if the word "star" occurs at the top of a page and the word "wars" occurs at the bottom, that page won't be listed in the search results.